Roger Michell has Morning Glory. No, you sniggering schoolboy types, we don’t mean that. Nor do we suppose that the cultured British director of Enduring Love, Changing Lanes and Notting Hill would have the album of the same name by those slovenly layabouts, Oasis.
What we do mean, though, is that Michell has signed on to direct a New York-based comedy named… well, that should be fairly obvious.
The movie revolves around a struggling TV producer, who hires an iconic, temperamental anchorman to revive her ailing morning news show.
Whoa – so far, so Anchorman 2. But although this year’s Venus was hilarious and bittersweet, Michell’s track record in comedy suggests he wouldn’t be seen anywhere near a movie as broad and surreal as that Will Ferrell classic, so expect this to hue closer to the Broadcast News model, as a satire of the way modern television news works.
But it could also be Michell’s most commercial movie since he had a brush with directing Bond 22, and certainly since Changing Lanes – the writer, Aline Brosh McKenna, penned last year’s chick-flick hit, The Devil Wears Prada, and J.J. Abrams, a man who knows a thing or two about pleasing large groups of people at the same time (again, please stop sniggering!), will co-produce for Paramount via his Bad Robot banner.
Filming starts in March next year, and we can reasonably expect to see Michell’s Morning Glory in 2009, giving us plenty of time to work on new erection jokes.